This week's new exhibitions

Friday 2 March 2012 19.05 EST
First published on Friday 2 March 2012 19.05 EST

Thomas Ruff, London

Thomas Ruff's manipulated images hark back to photography's early status as a kind of magic show, rendering life freshly marvellous and strange. One of art photography's heavy hitters, past experiments include turning photos of modernist interiors into illusory three-dimensional spaces with stereoscopic mirrored boxes and magnifying images of distant planets to the point that their surfaces dissolve. This double bill at Gagosian's London galleries sees him tackle two very different objects of fantasy. For nudes he takes images of internet porn, enlarging them to the point that the raw exposure of the performers' bodies becomes a more suggestive haze of pixels. ma.r.s. meanwhile sees him adapt black-and-white Nasa images of the red planet, flooding them with colour to create giant painterly prints and even rendering some of the works in 3D.

Gagosian, Britannia Street, WC1 and Davies Street, W1, Thu to 21 Apr

Skye Sherwin

Lisa Milroy, Newcastle upon Tyne

For this show, titled Ivory Lamp Mars Vine Bone, Lisa Milroy has selected paintings from 1984 to 2011 that demonstrate her highly imaginative use of black. Emerging in the 1980s when painting was going through one of its periodic revivals, Milroy has continued to produce work of rare painterly charisma with a highly distinctive and personal range of subject matter. Early works tended to focus on shoes, stamps, door handles and lightbulbs, laid out in grids of deceptive compositional predictability on a blank off-white background. The later work on show expands its perspective to include gardens, buildings and geishas, but retains its air of semi-surreal monochrome wonderment.

Gallery North, Tue to 4 Apr

Robert Clark

Shilpa Gupta, Bristol

Global boundaries, divisions and a culture of control are brought lyrically to light in Shilpa Gupta's work. Cages, steel security grills and iron gates rank among the forms her installations have taken in the past few years, though the prisons she refers to are of the psychological kind: fear and paranoia as social regulators. Her Singing Cloud is a hanging mass of bulbous black microphones, like a frozen storm cloud or a floating sea monster with a lumpy, bumpy hide. The mics have been reverse-wired to double as speakers from which a soundtrack of whispering voices and aeroplane engines pours. It complements her departure lounge flap board, where lines like "two twins are at war", create a fractured poem of terrorism, conflict and loss.

Arnolfini, to 22 Apr

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Edward Burra, Nottingham

For far too long Edward Burra has been dismissed as a eccentric minor talent, an interesting oddity working alone outside the mainstream trends of 20th-century modernism. But now that narrative is all acceptable again in the artworld, this timely exhibition should surely lead to a reassessment. Working in watercolour, Burra would find inspiration among the sailors and prostitutes of the southern ports of France and walk the cool jazz-era streets of 1930s Harlem. Back home in Rye he would build up images of a remarkable compositional vigour and aesthetic vibrancy that perfectly reflected his wild life adventures.

Alex Hubbard, London

Things are always on the move in the New York-based artist Alex Hubbard's work. A few years ago his videos recalled Jackson Pollock: shot from above, Hubbard's own pours of paint on Plexiglas became wipe-away colour field creations while household objects were hastily arranged, smashed and given spraypaint coatings. A more recent work involved rigging up a blank canvas behind a car, whiting out the vehicle's windows and wheels with paint and then driving the whole thing down the street. For his new paintings he uses finds from his studio and the street on canvas and stills daubed with glow-in-the-dark resin. Hubbard reflects a state of constant transformation, destruction and renewal.

Simon Lee Gallery, W1, to 5 Apr

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Topophobia, Liverpool

While the history of landscape art has been predominantly concerned with how sites of interest might look, the multimedia artworks here evoke an anxiety triggered by how a particular location might make one feel. Indeed the word topophobia refers to an irrational dread of certain places or situations. Marja Helander, a member of the nomadic Sámi peoples of Scandinavia, photographs herself dressed in full traditional garb as she selects her weekly groceries from a supermarket shelf. Elsewhere, in less tangible media, Louise K Wilson uses hi-tech recording equipment to foreground sounds of sites that might have accrued an unsettling ambience, military test sites or locations of mysterious disappearances. It's art that is almost not there but what is there takes us somewhere else indeed.

The Bluecoat, to 22 Apr

RC

Alice Channer, London

Channer's clothing-inspired sculptures aren't afraid to get up close and personal with consumer culture. Referencing fashion designs and throwaway high-street fare alike, she focuses on the products that literally touch our bodies. Here, she collides the current with literal classics, the hand-carved with the machined. Stretchy Top Shop items, the flowing, folding drapery of classical statues and Yves Saint Laurent's Le Smoking suit have variously inspired giant digital prints that fall cape-like from the ceiling, conflations of cast aluminium with spandex or polished marble and sheets of stainless steel shimmering like satin.

South London Gallery, SE5, to 13 May

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On Kawara, Gateshead

On Kawara makes art that marks time. His Today Series paintings, begun in 1966, consist of each day's date painted in black on a plain white background. The poignancy of other works relies on a demonstration of the past expanding as the future shrinks. Central to this exhibition is One Million Years, a live performance for which two participants will sit in a windowed booth and recite dates from two books titled Past and Future. Past covers the years 998,031 BC to 1969 and Future begins for some reason with the year 1993 and extends through to 1,001,992 AD, all of which will take the two month run of the show to complete.